Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973)

Hey, let’s talk Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath!

My brother had a ninety minute cassette with this on one side when we were growing up. He doesn’t remember it – I asked him - which is probably because I more or less appropriated it from 1982 on. He remembered owning the actual album, but that must've been later, or maybe he hid that one from me, lest I appropriate it as well. 

Fun fact: I listened to that tape from West Germany 1983 all the way through Rhode Island 1993 without ever even knowing the song titles. What? How? Pre-internet, man. Said cassette only had "Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath" written on it, no other markings. And you couldn't just bike to the library and look up the song titles for SBS back in those days. Nope. As established previously, you wanted to know anything about Black Sabbath, you had to go find some dirtbag somewhere, probably in a garage filled with smoke with empty huffed-paint cans all around. And how would you know if he was even right?

I mean, I suppose I could have picked up the cassette at the mall or something and looked the titles over. Maybe I did, who knows. I have no memory of doing it if so, nor a memory of a single other friend who owned it. I don't know if I ever even saw the cover until I bought the CD in the early 90s.

So after phoning it in for three albums, Sabbath returns to their cover design A-game. (Designed by Drew Struzan, a man on the cusp of an extraordinary career.) I always thought the front cover represented what was waiting for the man on the back cover (a hypocrite) after he died. But apparently they're meant to be different people, just a good and evil, duality of life sort of thing. Striking: one of the all time greats. 

(Sidenote: it's a good thing my brother and I didn't have this cover, as it would have definitely been confiscated by the parental units. I've spoken elsewhere of talking my parents into letting me keep Judas Priest - my Devil and Daniel Webster moment; peaked early, alas  - but one look at that cover and that would have been that.)

Let's jump in.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

When Ozzy first heard this riff, he screamed "WE'RE BACK!" Tony must have felt relieved as well, as it broke a spell of writer's block. It had to be something being in a band with someone like Tony Iommi. How many monster riffs did this guy come up with? For rock guitarists, pound for pound has anyone else come close? Eddie Van Halen, maybe? Jimmy Page? And the other guys in the band are Geezer, Bill Ward, and Ozzy! Lightning in a bottle.

A five star song if there ever was one. What an ending. The whole damn thing. Everything is perfect. 

A National Acrobat

And speaking of riffs - here's another of my favorite ones. This is such a perfect song two for a record. Do I think that because SBS more or less formed my idea of how albums and album-sides should go? Possibly. It's a chicken-and-egg question I never solve. All I know is when I first heard Nine Inch Nails' Wish EP years later, that fantastic one-two combo of "Wish" into "Last" always reminded me of how perfectly "Spiral Architect" follows "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" and I used to tell anyone who'd listen.

These lyrics are so perfect.

"I've lived a thousand times / I've found out what it means to be believed."

I like this comment from that lyrics page: "(The song) describes the thoughts of an unborn child. In the end, the lyrics give some general advice about life itself. As we were all born, we should live our life to the fullest." A generous interpretation? But sensible.

Fluff

I'm not the person to ask about this one. I love it. One of the first things I ever learned to play on guitar. Might be filler for others, I don't know. When Sabbath fans talk about this kind of thing usually they nominate "Laguna Sunrise" as their soft-spoken Sabbath acoustic tune. 

Sabra Cadabra

Just isolate that intro. Cool riff, cool band joining in, then Ozzy's vocal entrance around the fifty second mark - that's rock and roll, my friends. 

That's Rick Wakeman on the keyboards and boogie-woogie keys. He and Yes were recording in the studio next door, and he popped over to say hello. He refused compensation, but they paid him in beer. Hey, that's more than Eddie Van Halen was compensated for his work on "Beat It". 

Ozzy allegedly sings "Lovely lady, make love all night long" during this part. But it sounds more like "Love me, lay-ay-yeaaahaa, maker of all my wrong ." I had my ears to the boombox a lot, growing up, trying to make that one out. 

Killing Yourself To Live

Here's a lot of people's favorite Sabbath song, including Kirk and Lars of some later-metal band. Pretty foolproof track. Ozzy sings his heart out on this album. Anyone who disagrees, try and sing along sometime. 

I'm not a huge fan of Ozzy's vocals. I think a lot of his work with Sabbath could've used another take or two, and his timbre gets whinier and whinier in the 80s and beyond. But listen to his work here and all over this record. There should be no doubt he was a hell of a vocalist. I think people have gotten used to slagging him off. Every singer's voice deteriorates over time. Metal is not an easy genre for tenors - not that any genre probably is, over a long enough period of time. I don't know how Ozzy didn't rend his throat to drug-smithereens by the mid-70s, never mind still being able to sing all of his old tunes throughout the 90s. 

Who Are You

I know that I must have been watching Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings a lot when I first discovered this album, as I have a consistent video in my head of Nazgul flying around on fellbeast whenever I hear this song. Wherever that intersection of metal, the occult, Tolkien, and weird cosmic skies pulsating with the mysteries of the damned meet, I bet it sounds like this.

Like "Fluff," I don't know if this is one that will hit other people quite the same way. I do a pretty mean a cappella version of this one, all the parts, and almost updated the evidence to prove it. But I'll save it for our inevitable road trip to Pelennor Fields. 

Looking For Today

Another Ozzy-kills-it song. That long lead-in to the "When was the last time that you cried? YEAH-EAH-EAH-EAH-YEAAAH!" is so great.  Not to mention that note he leaps to during the chorus and fade-out. 

Spiral Architect

Almost feels like one song too many after the perfect finish of "Looking for Today" but once the riff kicks in and things take off, it all makes sense. The journey from the primordial-riff-sludge of the title track to this is complete. 

I've been singing this one since my earliest memories, yet somehow this 2021 listenthrough really drove home this home:

"Of all the things I value most in life / I see my memories and feel their warmth /
and know that they are good
(And you know that I should; YEAH YOU KNOW THAT I SHOULD!")

Hell yeah to that. Geezer's lyrics in general are great on this record. But hell. Such an underrated bastard.

~

Not only do I love this album – always have, always will – it’s pretty much the one that defines heavy metal as a genre for me: how it should sound, feel, how it should comport itself. When a metal band raises a clamor (usually a minor-chord one) in contempt of its sensibilities, they lose me. (Ditto for Pyromania.) Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath is the reason I don’t like much metal after 1990 and also why I never connected with many other Sabbath albums growing up. That came later. They got the formula exactly right here, as they did on Paranoid, too, sure, but this is a fully mature effort: the band, mk-1, at the height of its powers. The clarity in songwriting and production is even more striking coming after the last albums, where sludgy mud-metal was the goal. Geezer's lyrics - nihilistic perfection on Paranoid and elsewhere - have moments of real hope and inspiration here without coming across as New-Age-y or forced. 

It's an effortless-sounding record. For Ozzy, Geezer, Bill, and Tony, it will never be as good as this again. Though the next one comes pretty close.